A proud milestone for British ingenuity, agricultural science, and food security.
For the first time since 1932, a chocolate bar has been made entirely from British-grown ingredients, and it did not come from some far-flung tropical plantation, but from the county of Berkshire.
The bar, fittingly named the Reading 100, was created by researchers at the University of Reading to mark the institution’s 100th anniversary, and it stands as a remarkable achievement in British food science.
A Royal Precedent
Remarkably, this is only the second time in history that Britain has produced a chocolate bar from home-grown cocoa. The first, made by Rowntree’s in 1932 using cocoa from a glasshouse plant at their York headquarters, was gifted to a six-year-old Princess Elizabeth, who later became Queen Elizabeth II. She remains, to this day, the only person ever to have tasted that original bar.
From Pod to Bar, Without Leaving Reading
The Reading 100 was the work of Maha Khan, a University of Reading food security master’s student, who personally harvested, fermented, and processed the cocoa from start to finish. She was supported by food science experts in the university’s Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences, and the finished bar combined the home-grown cocoa with British sugar and British milk.
Ms Khan said the project had been an extraordinary opportunity to follow the entire chocolate-making process, from pod, to bean, to bar, without ever leaving Reading. She added that the achievement highlighted the skill, patience, and precision required to bring chocolate to Britain’s shelves, and the importance of protecting cocoa farmers and their crops worldwide.
Berkshire’s World-Leading Cocoa Centre
The cocoa itself came from the University of Reading’s International Cocoa Quarantine Centre, a remarkable and little-known British institution that holds a collection of more than 300 varieties of cocoa plant, and which is responsible for handling 97% of the world’s international movement of cocoa plants. Based in Berkshire, the climate-controlled centre exists to stop the spread of pests and disease between the world’s cocoa-growing regions, while giving British scientists a unique platform from which to study the crop.
It is a facility that quietly places Britain at the very centre of the global chocolate trade, even though not a single cocoa pod is grown here commercially.
British Ingenuity, Global Responsibility
Professor Carol Wagstaff, director of AgriFood Futures at the University of Reading, said the UK chocolate industry rests on a supply chain stretching thousands of miles to the tropics of Africa, South America, and Asia, and that a resilient global market remains crucial to the smallholder farmers who underpin it, many of whom farm in regions most exposed to the risks of climate change.
She noted that while growing and buying local produce often makes good sense, for health, for the economy, and for the environment, it is not a universal rule, and that international trade in food can provide valuable economic stability for communities around the world. She added that continued investment in research would be essential to keep emerging threats, such as pests, disease, and climate change, at bay.
A Century of British Innovation
The Reading 100 chocolate bar is being unveiled as part of the University of Reading’s centenary celebrations throughout 2026, marking a hundred years of world-leading British research, spanning food, farming, and climate science.
It is, in short, a small bar with a large story: a story of British scientific excellence, careful stewardship of a fragile global crop, and a reminder that behind every bar of chocolate lies a supply chain worth protecting, for farmers overseas and consumers here at home alike.
